VM and JF hosted a book party for me at their lovely apartment in Woodside last night. It was a spendidly casual and friendly affair, with plenty to eat and drink, and good talk to be had. Friends from my school mingled with friends from my other life, and the two worlds did not collide, but met on the common ground of a warm spring evening. Windows were thrown open. A police siren blared its passage through my reading at one point, but it was received like a needle by the fabric of the evening. Someone has just returned from Paris. Someone else returned from Japan with viral pnuemonia. And yet another person cycled to MoMA that afternoon and back, for it was the kind of day when one would cycle across the bridge into Manhattan.

Someone was there who represented a past love. Others came as husbands, and then became their own persons. Someone gave out flyers to his coming solo art exhibition. Someone else gave out namecards for the journal he edits. Someone brought a delicious pumpkin c…

The human figure, his own and others', preoccupied Picasso to the end of his life. "Mosqueteros," an exhibition at Gagosian of his late paintings, curated by his biographer John Richardson, is violent and heroic. The painter, here in various guises, is a musketeer, a matador, and a clown. The women are giantesses. One of my favorites in this exhibition is "Femme" 1972, a mountain of a woman who dominates what looks like a park.

The sex in many paintings are explicit, the figures not so much coupling (with the connotation of freight cars) as grappling, the cubist angles further contorting bodies and movements. Often, the man in these scenes pushes his face into the woman's face, as if to seize her by his eyes alone. In "Etreinte" 1972, the penis may look unimpressive, but not the huge straining arms and legs, against a backdrop of cheerful blue waves.

He grapples not only with humans, but also with superhumans. The self-portraits strive to outdo mast…

Robert Falls directs this early Eugene O'Neill's play (1924, whereas The Iceman Cometh was written in 1939 and Long Day's Journey into Night in 1941). A huge space, St. James Theatre is more usually used for musicals than for plays, but it is the right setting for an epic set. The fire curtain rises to reveal a stage dominated by rocks on rocks, and rocks are suspended mid-air too, by ropes. Also suspended in mid-air is the house over which the characters fight to own, and so hangs accordingly over their heads like a monstrous sword. The patriarch of the family Ephraim Cabot (played massively by Brian Dennehy) is a hard man who compels his three sons to work for him in the hope of inheriting the farm he raised from the rocks. Brutal in appearance and action, but too soft to stand against their father, the two oldest flee early in the play for California, hoping to strike easy gold. The third son Eben (Pablo Schreiber), of a different mother, remains behind, only to fall in…

I watched the movie for Marlon Brando, and he did not disappoint. His character Paul is a study of inarticulate grief. His wife dead from suicide, he takes up with a young engaged woman (Jeanne played by Maria Schneider) on the condition that both remain anonymous to each other: personal knowledge is too painful. So sex, sex and more sex in an unfurnished apartment that stands for a relationship stripped bare of context, for an unrenovated present. The tragedy comes when Paul changes, when he wants more, only to find Jeanne wanting less. Without diluting the specificity of the widower's grief, one can still say that the same tragedy applies to all relationships of unequal passion.

Of the infamous anal sex scene, Maria Schneider, at 55, was reported in New York Post as saying, "I never use butter to cook anymore--only olive oil." Tragedy turned bathos.

My brother-in-law, four-year-old niece and I watched this musical on Thursday, while my sister and mum stayed with the baby. New Amsterdam, on 42th Street, is a beautiful old theater, built in a grand style, embellished in an ornate manner. This "new" musical, presented by Disney and Cameron Mackintosh, is based on the stories of P. L. Travers and the Walt Disney Film. Original music and lyrics by Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman, with new songs and additional music and lyrics by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe. The book is by Julian Fellowes. The producer is Thomas Schumacher who announced at the beginning of our show that it was the 1000th performance. Scarlett Strallen played Mary Poppins. Though Mary Poppins is supposed to resemble her author's childhood Dutch doll, Stallen came off as robotic at times, a fatal problem since Poppins is the complex heart of the story. The boyish Australian Adam Fiorentino, who was making his Broadway debut, played Bert, the ch…

Just came home with a painting I bought at the art fair at the LGBT Center last Sunday. The painting is of the head and shoulders of a young Greek man who, according to the artist, is a bartender at Elmo, a restaurant at 7th Avenue and 19th Street. The man looks out of the painting, his head tilted slightly backwards and right, as if to present his full lips for a kiss. Five o'clock shadow that brushes a strong jaw-line plunges dramatically to the base of the throat, ending in a bruise-like patch, black and red. Very dark eyes, the right a black oval lightened only with a single stroke of white. Thick black hair reaches down to the back of his neck. It is the skin--painted mainly in white and pink, with uneven strokes to suggest light and shadow, as well as the natural roughness of skin--that convinces me that a painting is superior to a sculpture. I know that this is a silly thing to say, in a way. But this painting gives what no sculpture could give: a living, breathing kouros, …

JMS and I went to see "The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989" last Friday at 6 PM, when admission was free. According to the exhibition notes, The Third Mind refers to a "cut-ups" work by Beat writers William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, whose cult of spontaneity in art and life drew inspiration from Asian attitudes. As even this note illustrates, there was far too much generalizing about "Asian attitudes" in the exhibition than I could stand. "Asia" in the exhibition was predominantly--and predictably --Japanese, and within Japanese culture, Zen. "Asia" was presented as an ahistorical and undifferentiated Other. Yes, the artists saw Asia that way, but I would have liked the exhibition to give more context to that way of seeing. I did not care for the post-War World II stuff (mainly installations, performance art, videos), though Ernest Fenollosa's book "The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poe…

TNY March 30, 2009 from Paul Goldberger's article on Andrea Palladio (1508-1580) "All He Surveyed": Palladio was born in Padua and grew up in Vicenza. He was trained as a stonemason, but his potential must have been clear, because he had a knack for finding mentors. * . . . he essentially invented the modern architectural career. The "Four Books [of Architecture]," which Palladio published in 1570, when he was in his sixties, is not just a book of rules and standards but also the first architectural monograph. Palladio included a portfolio of his own work, which disseminated his ideas and made his buildings more famous than anyone else's. * Yet the tradition of reverence that has sprung up around Palladio's work is in danger of obscuring its humbler but more interesting features. Since many villas were not only aristocratic retreats but also working farms, he made specific recommendations about where to place granaries, haylofts, quarters for animals, and wi…

My poem "You Know, Don't You" has just been published in this anthology edited by William Roetzheim, a poet I know from Poetry-Free-For-All. The anthology is divided into sections: one, Courting, Beauty and Unrequited Love; two, Lust; three, Love; four, Commitment; five, Separation; six, Philandering and Temptation; and seven, Redemption. I am in Lust. No love or redemption there. But no Separation, either. William includes with new poems by living writers old poems by dead ones. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is here, with four "Sonnets from the Portuguese." Shakespeare is the guest of honor, represented by six poems, the most number in the book. Petronius Arbiter, Amy Lowell, Robert Herrick, William Blake, Emily Dickinson and Omar Khayam also drop in. I sit at the table between John Keats ("O Blush Not So") and Ezra Pound ("Tame Cat"). I remind you we are sitting at the table of lust.

March 27, Friday: I watched the Columbia-Barnard Classical Drama Group's performance of Euripides' Medea in the Minor Latham Playhouse, at Barnard. The actors spoke in Ancient Greek, which was glossed with English super-titles. Medea was played by two women roped to each other, in order to reflect her dual nature and internal conflict. My friend, who played the Nurse, spoke of her mistress' grief with genuine pathos. The other actors seemed too young to feel their parts.

April 2, Thursday: Heard the NY Phil with TCH last night. Stravinsky's Concerto in E-flat for Chamber Orchestra, Dumbarton Oaks (1937-38) opened the concert. Lisa Batiashvili was the soloist in Prokofiev's modernist Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op, 63 (1935), a work he wrote before repatriating to the Soviet Union. Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64 (1888), after the intermission, was not subtle but rousing nevertheless. The horn in the second movement was lovely. The "fat…